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“Get a job!” That’s the cliched response to panhandlers and anyone else who complains of being broke. But what if you can’t?
That dilemma is the crux of an evolving silent crisis that threatens to undermine the foundation of the American economic model.
Two-thirds of gross domestic product, most of the economy, is fueled by personal consumer spending. Most spending is sourced from personal income, overwhelmingly from salaries paid by employers. But employers will need fewer and fewer employees.
You don’t need a business degree to understand the nature of the doom loop. A smaller labor force earns a smaller national income and spends less. As demand shrinks, companies lay off many of their remaining workers, who themselves spend less, on and on until we’re all in bread lines.
Assuming there are any charities collecting enough donations to pay for the bread.
The workforce participation rate has already been shrinking for more than two decades, forcing fewer workers to pay higher taxes. It’s about to get much worse.
Workers are already being replaced by robotics, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation. Estimates vary about how quickly these technologies will kill many American jobs as they scale and become widely accepted, but there’s no doubt the effects will be huge and that we will see them sooner rather than later. A report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University finds that two million manufacturing jobs will disappear within the coming year; Freethink sounds the death knell for 65% of retail gigs in the same startlingly short time span. A different MIT study predicts that “only 23%” of current worker wages will be replaced by automation, but it won’t happen immediately “because of the large upfront costs of AI systems.” Disruptive technologies like AI will create new jobs. Overall, however, McKinsey consulting group believes 12 million Americans will be kicked off their payrolls by 2030.
“Probably none of us will have a job,” Elon Musk said earlier this year. “If you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job. But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”
For this to work, Musk observed, idled workers would have to be paid a “universal high income” — the equivalent of a full-time salary, but to stay at home. This is not to be conflated with the “universal basic income” touted by people like Andrew Yang, which is a nominal annual government subsidy, not enough to pay all your expenses.
“It will be an age of abundance,” Musk predicts.
The history of technological progress suggests otherwise. From the construction of bridges across the Thames during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that sidelined London’s wherry men who ferried passengers and goods, to the deindustrialization of the Midwest that has left the heartland of the United States with boarded-up houses and an epic opioid crisis, to Uber and Lyft’s solution to a nonexistent problem that now has yellow-taxi drivers committing suicide, ruling-class political and business elites rarely worry about the people who lose their livelihoods to “creative destruction.”
Whether you’re a 55-year-old wherry man or cabbie or accountant who loses your job through no fault of your own other than having the bad luck to be born at a time of dramatic change in the workplace, you always get the same advice. Pay to retrain in another field — hopefully you have savings to pay for it, and hopefully your new profession doesn’t become obsolete too! “Embrace a growth mindset.” Whatever that means. Use new tech to help you with your current occupation — until your boss figures out what you’re up to and decides to make do with just the machine.
Look at it from their — the boss’s — perspective. Costs are down, profits are up. They don’t know you. They don’t care about you. Guilt isn’t a thing for them. What’s not to like about the robotics revolution?
Those profits, however, belong to us at least as much as they do to “them” — employers, bosses, stockholders. AI and robots are not magic; they were not conjured up from thin air. These technologies were created and developed by human beings on the backs of hundreds of millions of American workers in legacy and now-moribund industries. If the wealthy winners of this latest tech revolution are too shortsighted and cruel to share the abundance with their fellow citizens — if for no better reason than to save their skins from a future violent uprising and their portfolios from disaster when our consumerism-based economy comes crashing down — we should force them to do so.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
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We really need some form of ‘Universal Income’ due to tons of people being incapable of offering anything to Society that isn’t counter-productive. Given their IQs, personalities and behaviours.
There is no Free-Will.
…it’s not their fault being counter-productive, in this current Civilisation. However, likewise, there’s no argument why the high-IQ must support ’em.
Hence, I suggest: That the humane solution has to be…
…a ‘Eugenics Programme’ to phase ’em out slowly.
P.S.: My proposal is an incentives-based programme, to ‘nudge’ them; 100% voluntary!
Please be one of the first “nudged” out of the door then.
I’ve long called for a minimum wage of $150/hr.
Doing this will surely provide the mythical “living wage” for poor people that so many on the left bleat about endlessly.
Before the 20th century most people were slaves or domestic servants.
A rich man has plenty to eat, but his demand for flattery can never be satisfied. The unemployed must accept their humiliation, and the free market will provide the solution.
Another in a long line of believers in the idea that there are “too many people, therefore some of them must go”, yet refuses to follow his own advice and show the way. Counter-productive, I say.
The fascinating thing is that so many people who are victimized by capitalism so revere it, and fairly foam at the mouth at the mere mention of a system that actually prioritizes “the common welfare” over the selfish greed of the money-and power addict class. Sure, it would be the end of civilization as we know it if you got to keep a fairer share of the wealth that your labor creates – because there would go your chance of joining the leisure class too. A memorable cartoon in the otherwise reprehensible propaganda organ The New Yorker showed a working guy in a bar telling a smiling, approving man in an expensive suit, “As a future lottery winner, I oppose higher taxes on the rich too!” As Mister Carlin said, they don’t call it “the American dream” for nothing.
Why is this doofus shitlib on this site?
Boorrrrrrrrring!
Back in the late 1960s Garrett Hardin, as often a lone voice, said the US needed to close the immigration door and build down population because we were reaching the limit of our national carrying capacity. We have exceeded that limit and continue to import people for some crazy misguided reason. Rall is right in part, we need a universal high income, but we also need to reduce domestic population drastically to eliminate the excess people. We should close the border to legal and illegal immigration. For those that remain, we should adopt something like China’s old one child policy. We should license child birth, and we should not allow folks to have children who possess bad genetic traits likely to lead to disease–and easy example is folks who carry the gene for Huntington’s disease should not be licensed to have a child. As a society we need to take seriously the virtues we can get from the application of robotics and AI to eliminate the need for most labor. That means changing how we view wealth, income, and property so that the benefits do not accrue only to today’s 1%, but also so that we are no longer a nation of 350 million, but maybe a nation of 80 million if even.
The main goal should be to liberate Free Time by (1) reducing the statutory working week to 24 hours (all overtime double-time), (2) outlawing usury sensu stricto, (3) indexing the minimum wage to inflation, and (4) prohibiting the non-professional employment of women:
https://www.academia.edu/37921808/Notes_on_Money_and_Freedom
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In no country–much less the global aggregation–will socioeconomic productivity rise above bare relative sufficiency (and sustainability) in output lacking concerted and intelligent articulation of the underlying mainsprings supporting the liberation of Free Time as described, for the required development of labor productivity (together with sustainable technique) ultimately depends on them.
Garrett Hardin was right and I agreed with him as a necessary principle.
The addition to Hardin’s sensible proposals was a retro-engineering of the interstate commerce laws that were booted up during the civil rights flap.
Having been done, they needed to be radically scrapped. The USA needs devolution into smaller sections with self-reliance and local content built into the system.
(Anyone puzzling should recall the most successful work-profit system ever taking place on the North American continent: It was the Canadian car deal. Canada told Detroit (this was when Motown built them ALL) that they’d be happy to buy US cars — but for every dollar spent on a US car, the company in question would have to spend an equal amount buying from Canada. It was a match made in banker’s heaven — hence on, thousands of car parts companies sprang up all over the Great White North, and if did indeed equal the amount spent on US cars. Till NAFTA, etc etc.)
Trade can never be “free” it only destroys workers in First World countries. It must be quid pro quo like the US-Canada deal THAT WORKED till the sleazebags sold us out!
None of that is needed. AI/robots/automation is coming to take away your jobs soon. Then you will not even have to work 1 hour per week. You will be allocated enough Soylent Green to fill your nutritional needs and a small room to live out the remainder of your life. New human pregnancies will be forbidden.
If all or almost all work is done by robots and AI, there’s really no “get a job” solution. Who knows how things will develop, but one scenario is fully automated luxury communism, and another one is neofeudalism where useless eaters live in pods, own nothing and are “happy” while their numbers are being reduced over time with various means by the powers that be. If the rich and powerful can have fully automated luxury communism for themselves only, why would they want to share the the finite resources of this planet with the useless masses? If you’re not needed for economic production and not needed for war, then you’re just useless carbon that must be reduced.
That wasn’t my argument, from the get-go.
And your line of reasoning is fallacious, BTW.
Why not $200?
Just image how high the GDP will be! ☮
Never mind AI, which is a stupid thing. Most work done even nowadays is not really “needed”. You certainly don’t need to stay 8 hours a day in an office.
Just as you don’t need to be so long in school, or university.
This is done just to keep people busy, because most people are dumb or evil. If they are not kept busy, they go crazy or start doing bad stuff (idle hands are the devil’s workshop etc).
I remember when they said that in the future robots would do all the work and people would dedicate themselves to art and self-fulfillment. LOL.
Well, I personally wouldn’t have a lot of trouble spending my free time reading or creating stuff, but I realize that most people in this world get bored pretty easily and have no creativity, talent or even interest in reading or any of that.
Sure, they could spend their whole day eating chips, watching Netflix or porn and posting stuff on social media, which is what most people do nowadays anyway. Perhaps they could be paid to do it?
But it doesn’t seem very meaningful. Then again, fake make-work is also not meaningful.
Perhaps the luddites were right. The Amish are right. The modern world is a nightmare.
Who’s going to build the robots? Sounds like a job. Robots are going to grow our pot? I don’t think so. Robot plumbers? Are you going to trust a robot electrician? Can’t believe everything Musk says. How’s that Hyperloop coming Elon? His business is built on government subsidies and not only your Tesla but your neighbor’s Tesla is trying to kill you.
Someone’s got to do the spreadsheets, DTP the documents, get the coffee or ketamine…
The proposed idea is the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
Robtos will build robots in robot operated factories. Robots will then build houses for the meat (humans). Everything will be free!
I’ve posted this before:
NOW you’re getting with the program!
And what was your reasoning? I don’t know what you meant. I only know what you said. And please explain why my line of reasoning is fallacious.
The Luddites were highly skilled and often literate men of independent mind who saw that machines were going to enslave them to the moneyed class, which alone could obtain the capital needed to buy them. The moneyed class won that battle and since history is written by the victors we now think of the Luddites as ignorant and brutish beings who feared progress because they were unable to comprehend it. That was not the case.
I) I’m not a Eugenics advocate due to overpopulation.
II) It is fallacious because it doesn’t attack the argument in itself. That argument is true (or false!) whether or not I exist at all.
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Fun Fact…
There’s something called “Fallacy Fallacy” i.e. to argue a position is wrong due to being, often or not, formulated in a fallacious manner is in itself a fallacy.
Random example: Many theists use fallacies to defend God’s existence; such bad arguments don’t make God not exist suddenly.
I don’t care and will not read what you posted previously. Not here for homework, Buckwheat.
As I said, a perpetual motion machine. You’re fucking wrong and her father kinda wants you to stop fucking her.
If TUR had a minimum IQ requirement of 85, you wouldn’t be allowed to post anything here.
Neither would YOU!
Musk does not ascribe credit where due. In 1970, Buckminster Fuller stated that
– many jobs were already meaningless
– due to advances in technology, voluntary work by a small minority was already enough to begin providing the essentials to everyone.
The entire history of world post-industrialization has been one long arc of hiding unemployment. We have hosts of corporate folks who could disappear tomorrow and their employers wouldn’t notice the difference. Even a good percentage of the people directly making things aren’t really necessary, their jobs only exist because marketing experts convince the masses to buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have.